Base, Vile, and Depraved: Blasphemy and Other Moral Genealogies

When British citizen Sebastian Horsley set off from London to promote his new book, Dandy in the Underworld: An Unauthorized Autobiography, and landed at Newark airport, he fully expected to gain entry into the United States. Horsley, a writer, artist, and overall self-produced gadfly, trafficked in quotable quips like “I can count all the lovers I’ve had on one hand . . . if I’m holding a calculator.”¹ The Soho dandy was most notorious for having voluntarily undergone a crucifixion for art’s sake in the year 2000. Much like his trip to New Jersey, that provocative performance ended in spectacular failure as Horsley passed out and then fell off the cross when the footrest broke. Eight years later, Horsley was detained at Newark, questioned for eight hours, and eventually denied entry into the United States. In the aftermath, he reported: “I was dressed flamboyantly—top hat, long velvet coat, gloves. . . . My one concession to American sensibilities was to remove my nail polish. I thought that would get me through.”² This confluence of ostentatious self-presentation with infamous debauchery and blasphemous performance art may have been factors in Horsley’s barment at the border, though none of these were excludable offenses in US immigration law. The official charge was “moral turpitude,” the evidence of which was supplied by his memoir itself.

The vague definition of moral turpitude (from the Latin turpis, meaning “ugly, foul or disgraceful”) as “base or shameful character” found a convenient fit with Horsley’s self-professed drug-and “prostitute-riddled past.”³ As an Anglo-American category, moral turpitude enfolds residual religious ideas about the body, character, and conduct with secular understandings of sex, race, and citizenship. At the borders of these categories, as well as at the borders of the United States, legal abstractions become material realities with pernicious effects. Conviction of a crime of moral turpitude can be used to impeach a witness, disbar a lawyer, bar an immigrant, or deport a lawful permanent resident from the country.⁴

The New York Times eschewed this dark and gnarled legal history, covering the Horsley moment in the style section. Above a photo of the artist posed in a black top hat and red vest against a cabinet of human skulls ran the headline “What Moral Turpitude Looks Like.”⁵ Horsley’s decadent dandyism here functioned as an amusing color feature, focusing on his “temporal drag,” a backward nod to Victorian sexual dissidents and literary icons past.⁶ Even as Horsley’s performance called up Oscar Wilde in the gaol, his creative anachronism read more as clever curiosity than actual crime or scandal. Seemingly more fit to print than the routine deportations of less spectacular migrants, this coverage stands in stark contrast to that of the ongoing expulsions that are rarely documented in national archives, let alone in the newspaper of record.

Yet this media event underscores how moral regulation at the border operates beyond the rubric of state repressive and protective power. Horsley’s own sartorial antiquarianism and the temporal recursion of such descriptors as “wickedness,” “vileness,” and “depravity” that attend the current legal definition of moral turpitude reveal how the dispersive powers of the state, in effect, articulate new queer identities.⁷ If Horsley’s experience is the exception to the rule of contemporary practices of racial and religious profiling, his case nonetheless illuminates a longer history of how moral turpitude manifests the raced and gendered boundaries of sexual propriety that continue to define and delimit national inclusion.

I begin with the tale of a performance artist at the border to tell a longer history of the entanglement of two categories—blasphemy and moral turpitude. Each is a seeming holdover from a religious past; each persists in our putatively secular present. If blasphemy is more figuration than legal fact, its capacious quality is particularly useful as an index of shifting cultural anxieties. As David Lawton has argued: “Blasphemy stands for whatever a society most abhors and has the power to prosecute. It is a form of religious vituperation against those who have transgressed the...